PORT-AU-PRINCE, HAITI—Some mysteries are like religion. They linger, forever out of reach, promising only possibility and puzzle. Others are like calculus problems, requiring investigation and pencil scribbling before proffering concrete answers.

There are many mysteries about the story of Lovely Avelus and the earthquake that cleaved this country 21/2 years ago. How did her little 2-year-old body, so small and bird-boned, survive the weight of two stories of concrete without even a scratch? How then did she survive there, trapped for six days without food or water or someone to buoy her little spirit with songs of hope and solace?

The mystery of who dug down through the rubble and scooped her to safety also seemed like one that might never be solved. Until this very moment.

Gueteau Lalanne bends his long frame down and nuzzles into Lovely’s little face.

“Lovely, are you okay? Do you remember me?” he asks her in his sitting room. “My, you’ve grown.”

She squirms on her mother’s lap on a strange couch in this stranger’s home in her old neighbourhood. She is dressed as though for church — a new summer dress, lacey socks floating like clouds over her little polished Mary Janes, a gleaming white satin bow in her hair. She smiles coyly and presses her head into her mother’s chest.

The stories of
now 5-year-old Lovely and Lalanne, 37, entwined like two threads in a long tattered braid on the early evening of Jan. 12, 2010. Moments before the 7.0-Richter earthquake struck, Lovely was watching cartoons with her best friend Gaelle in Gaelle’s family’s room. The girls lived next door to one another on the bottom floor of a two-storey house, subdivided into tiny rooms for rent. Lovely’s mother, Rosemene Meristil, was next door lying down with Lovely’s little brother, Jonathan.

Meanwhile, a two-minute zig-zag walk away down cramped alleys, Lalanne was climbing up onto the roof of his one-storey house with a bag of cornmeal in hand. He’d just returned from work and was going to feed his pigeons.

Both heard what Haitians have come to call
goudou goudou
— the earthquake, which sounded like the roar of an approaching train. (
Goudou Goudou
is an onomatopoeic word, mimicking the noise the earth made as two tectonic plates far below rubbed together.)

It lasted only 35 seconds. But more than 100,000 houses in the surrounding city and countryside collapsed and up to 300,000 people were fatally injured or outright killed.

In Fort National, the slum tucked on a hill just above the crumpled National Palace where Lalanne and Lovely lived, 80 per cent of the houses either collapsed or were so damaged, they were deemed beyond repair, a USAID report states.

One of those was Gaelle’s rooming house.

Merisitil rose from her bed, snatched up Jonathan and raced outside in time to watch the building crumble — two stories of concrete atop her little girl. With Jonathan on her hip, she joined the flood of people pouring down into the Champs de Mars park below, in frantic search of her husband who had been selling sugar cane from a wheelbarrow on a crowded downtown street.

Meanwhile, Lalanne watched the dust and screams to Jesus rise in waves from his roof. His home, one of the few left standing, seemed like a tiny island in a mad sea.

He scrambled downstairs to find his wife and two daughters shaken but unharmed. Then he ran through his dusty yard to his father’s shed and pulled out his masonry tools — a sledgehammer, a metal pike, a crowbar.

“I made a choice to go for the younger ones first,” he says. “Adults are more resilient.”

Much has been
written about international heroes who roared into this broken country after Jan. 12 with medicine and good will to rescue the trapped and mend the broken.

Less has been written about the local ones. Lalanne is one.

Long and thin like a basketball player with the face of a Siamese cat — high, defined cheekbones and large serene eyes — he is both a natural leader and a gifted entrepreneur. He built two reservoirs on his property to collect potable water from tankers and sell by the bucket to locals, few of whom have running taps. From his small store on Fort National’s main road, Lalanne also sells pop, phone cards, chips and now, with all the rebuilding, concrete blocks and other building materials.

He also works as a mason, building homes, which is why he had the tools to smash and pry through concrete slabs to reach quake victims. Then there is his official job as a director for security for the Ministry of Social Services, although he admits he rarely shows up.

If he lived in Toronto, Lalanne’s ambition would likely have made him very rich by now.

As it is, he grew up in this slum and he remains in this slum, living with his wife and two girls and 1-year-old son, plus an astonishing array of animals including free-hopping rabbits, chickens, dogs and kittens. Their house is a step above the local standard, with ceramic tiles on the floor and a television in the sitting room, which works intermittently with electricity stolen from a far-off power line. (“My ancestors fought in the revolution too,” he explains. “If the government won’t give us electricity, we will take it.”)

In a small, dusty yard penned between broken houses out back, he keeps goats and turkeys. Pigeons push through a piece of corrugated tin on the roof.

Striding down the garbage-choked alleys that make up Fort National, everyone greets Lalanne warmly. They call him “
soldat
” and “
delege
,” because of the way he helps them — doling out loans and solutions to problems.

His love for both people and animals kept him in the neighbourhood, not just that night, but for the months after the earthquake, when most of his neighbours were building tin huts in the Champs de Mars.

That first evening after the
goudou goudou
, Lalanne manically broke concrete, dug through rubble, sawed metal rebar, calling out to the dead and the living. His memories are a gumbo of gore and despair. He describes himself as a motor that night, running on adrenaline and raw strength.

“I took so many people out. By midnight, I couldn’t do it anymore. I went back to my house and cried and cried and cried,” he says. “But I kept hearing the screams. So I got up and went back out to dig some more.”

The first person he dug out was Fabie, his daughter’s 12-year-old best friend, who lived next door. Her body had split open from the impact of the roof, spilling her intestines on the ground. “As far as I know, she died instantly,” he says. He put her on a door, and carried her up to the street, where soon there would be “so many bodies, they were piled up.”

He remembers, too, a nearby mother of three young boys, who was trapped under a metal gate. Although her upper body was exposed, Lalanne couldn’t pull her lower body out. “I used a hack saw to cut the gate, but it was no use,” he says. She died in front of him. “She kept saying, ‘Delege, you can’t do anything for me?’ ” he recalls.

There was elation, too, the joy of pulling out someone alive. Two hours after the quake, Lalanne hauled out his neighbour, James Nicholas, now 21, who was trapped under the remains of his friend Hurcher’s house.

“He was screaming, ‘Where are you? Where are you? I don’t see you.’ I was screaming, ‘I’m under the rubble, under the slab of the roof. Save me.’ He said, ‘I’m coming.’ ”

Hurcher, trapped nearby, suffocated to death.

“I think about him every day,” says Nicholas. “If it wasn’t for Lalanne, I would have died, too.”

At first, Lalanne felt like the only person left up on the broken hill of his neighbourhood. Soon, others joined to help — a fellow Muslim, a young local barber, even the rescued Nicholas, the student who had witnessed his friend die. Desrosiers, a local odd-jobs man known for his love of moonshine and his drunken dances through traffic most evenings, also joined the mission.

“That’s Haiti,” Lalanne says. “This is why things work here. When you are doing something positive, people find you. They just need a
commandant
.”

They worked together for more than a month, pulling out survivors at first and then fighting the dogs for the cadavers.

“I pulled a little kid out,” says Lionel “Baby” Joseph, a 28-year-old barber with a spider tattoo on one shoulder and a do-rag on his head. He too had raced madly to the Champs de Mars after the earthquake. But he returned the next morning to join Lalanne’s team.

The kid, he says, was a 6-year-old joker called Tracy, who used to always jump on his back. His head had been crushed by concrete. “I carried him to the front of St. Antoine Church. It was a pleasure for me. I carried him as if he was still alive.”

The group of rescuers figures they saved around 26 people those first few days.

Each man had a precise job. Lalanne heaved a sledgehammer, Desrosiers clawed out the rubble and Baby twisted his small frame through the resulting caverns to grab hands and pull.

“There were so many people suffering and yelling, when we finished one, boom, we’d go to another person,” Lalanne recalls.

Around four days after the quake, an excavator rumbled up to the top of the hill and dug a giant pit for the bodies.

Fort National is
full of ghosts today, memories of the dead at every corner. It is also full of the risen, people like Lovely, who were dug, pulled, pried out from under the rubble and survived.

Unlike
goudou goudou
, there is no new word for those who were hauled from a jumbled grave back to life on Jan. 12. Perhaps they are too common to deserve a special Creole name. Everyone here is a survivor. Or perhaps a few months living in a squalid refugee camp muffled that initial survivor’s elation. They no longer differentiate themselves from the rest of Haiti’s miserable.

I spend three mornings recently delicately navigating the garbage-choked alleys of Fort National with Lalanne, talking to his
ekip
(team) and the risen they had saved.

Most are still haunted by that day, when they lost everything and almost lost their lives. Most are also resigned, if not bitter.

“Every day, I think, I lost everything. We lost everything,” says Smith Saint-Fleur, a 33-year-old former neighbour of Lalanne’s. “There is no life in Haiti. Life is in New York, Miami, Canada. That’s where life is.”

Saint-Fleur has suffered headaches since the earthquake. Sometimes, his vision gets blurry. The concrete of his roof crushed his head for a day, until Lalanne and his team dug him out.

He hasn’t been able to return to his job as a mason and he can only rarely afford medication for the pain or for food.

“The people who used to help me died,” he says. “Now, hunger kills you and no one helps you because they don’t have anything for themselves either.”

When I ask Wildine Pidre what the earthquake has changed, her eyes grow wide and dart from side to side nervously.

“I remember some times,” she says quietly. She was trapped beneath three storeys of rubble beside the feet of her 4-year-old cousin. She couldn’t see his head, but she listened to him first call for his mother and father, then make “weird sounds” until he went silent. Baby crawled down to her the next day and pulled aside the concrete above her. She is grateful.

But her life is nothing, she says. She, like most Haitians, hasn’t found a job.

“I’m not working,” says Pidre, 27. “I’m not doing anything.”

The morning I meet Sadock François on the road, he looks as promising as a new penny in his crisp uniform, canvas suitcase in hand. He’s off to work at the Haitian National bank, where after 27 years, he is now the deputy manager of security.

But two minutes into our conversation about the earthquake, his eyes brim with tears.

Lalanne saved his youngest child, 11-year-old Christelle. The morning after the earthquake, he shimmied on his back under the wreckage of Sadock’s house and found Christelle trapped under her dead mother.

François is rebuilding the house. It’s big, by local standards, with a deep septic tank being dug for an indoor toilet — an unheard-of luxury in Fort National. But he doesn’t want to live there. His sister in Montreal is sponsoring his immigration application to Canada.

“This is a bad memory,” he says, waving at his house. “I’m always sad now. I’m still traumatized. My daughter was my heart.”

Nicholas, the 21-year-old whose friend Hurcher died beside him, provides the only ray of optimism. Above all else, the earthquake taught him an intimate lesson on the fragility of life, he says.

He decided to change. He quit smoking marijuana. He quit drinking. He is finishing high school now, with the hopes of becoming a plumber.

“I have to do something with my life,” he says. “As long as I can breathe, there is hope.”

“Of course, I know
Lovely,” Lalanne told me a few weeks ago. I was interviewing him about the migration of people back into Fort National after years living in the Champs de Mars park, which had become a crowded and dangerous refugee camp. The move was funded with Canadian aid dollars. Lalanne’s business was booming.

In the middle of our conversation, I thought of Lovely. Although now living in the countryside an hour southeast of Port-au-Prince, this is where she had lived during the earthquake. I had visited the site of her former house with her family a couple years before.

But no matter how many people we spoke to, the mystery continued: Who had saved her? How had she ended up at a makeshift medical clinic near the airport, where I had met her, and finally, after weeks of first mourning her and then, hearing that a miracle had happened, searching through the broken city, her parents found her in the arms of a
blanc
aid worker.

Did Lalanne know the story of Lovely, the girl who had survived six days under the rubble?

“Everyone knows about her,” he responded. “But no one knows what happened to her after she was sent to the hospital.”

Do you know who saved her?

“It was me,” he said, leading me to his cache of masonry tools.

It took Lalanne and his team three days to locate the little voice that was calling for her mother from under three levels of concrete. There was the upper floor, but then a neighbour’s house had toppled on top of that, Lalanne says.

She kept calling for help and they kept pounding away, says Lalanne. They finally found her at the back of the third spot they smashed down into.

“The reason the cement roof didn’t splatter her, there was a table and the roof fell on the table, leaving her a very small, secluded space,” he says.

“She kept asking for water.I threw down some crackers to give her hope.”

After Christelle, Lalanne wouldn’t give any survivors water. She had died soon after drinking and he was convinced the two were linked. “Anyone we just gave oxygen to, they lived,” he says.

Lalanne says he cut a lot of rebar so Desrosiers could get down to Lovely.

The day after
finally hearing the story, I drive up to Lovely’s one-room house in the midst of scraggly corn fields to tell her family the news.

I find Meristil sitting on the floor, combing Lovely’s hair into braids. Her hands freeze in place as I describe Lalanne. She stands up and sits on the edge of the family’s small, boney bed.

“Did you confirm it? Are you sure it is him?” she asks seriously, as I pull out my computer to show her photos of Lalanne. She has heard through the
tele-djol
(Creole for “mouth television” or gossip mill) that a local drunk with a thin beard named Chocholi saved Lovely. But she has never met him.

I ask Lalanne and Desrosiers to take us to the site where they had rescued Lovely. We cut past the turkeys and goats in Lalanne’s back yard and step out into the slum, a parade of heroes and skeptics and risen and
blanc
journalists. Lalanne’s long legs navigate the heaps of Styrofoam containers and rum bottles and discarded limes that clog the thin alleys.

We pass a half-naked girl bathing from a bucket and some neighbourhood boys kicking a tennis ball around the floor of what once was a house. Fort National is slowly rebuilding itself, one plot at a time. For now, the empty concrete spots feel like tombstones in a graveyard.

We climb a hill, slip down another thin alley, make a sharp left and stop abruptly before a little two-door shed, roughly hammered together with scraps of plywood and corrugated tin.

“This is where you lived,” Lalanne says to Lovely. “Do you remember this place?”

Meristil’s eyes narrow. She scans the surrounding houses, now mostly quilts of metal and plywood too, searching for something familiar.

A man steps out of the shack wearing nothing but a red towel around his waist.

“
Bonjou
friend,” he says to Meristil. “Where are you living now?”

It’s her former landlord, Pierre Richard Augustin, who moved back from the Champs de Mars a few months ago, and built this small two-room house. He’s renting out the other room for $200 a year.

Curious neighbours poke their heads out their doors.

“
Bonjou
Felicine,” Meristil shouts, a smile cracking her face.

“Is Mama Sul still here?”

She has come home.

While the handshaking and catching up unfolds, I watch Lovely in her mother’s arms and think about how her life has changed since the earthquake.

Each time I visit her family in their one-room house, I’m struck by their poverty. They have no electricity, no running water, a hole out front as a toilet, just four plastic chairs and a bed frame — no mattress — for furniture.

Compared to her former home, it’s spacious and clean and safe. The air smell is of pine and eucalyptus trees, not urinals and rotting food.

Lovely is also starting Grade 1 at a good school in September, thanks to the generosity of Toronto Star readers. I doubt she would be studying at all, had she stayed here.

Unlike the other risen I’ve met in Fort National, Lovely is better off than she was before. For her, the earthquake reconstruction delivered what international donors promised — a better life, borne from tragedy.

“I don’t want to move back here,” Meristil says, as we pick our way back to Lalanne’s home. “There is too much garbage, too much pee, too many mosquitoes. I don’t like this area anymore.”

She privately thanks Lalanne and Desrosiers, convinced of their legitimacy now. We say our goodbyes and pile back into my rented car.

“Everyone’s satisfied,” he says. “We finally got the closing of the case of Lovely.”

Lalanne carries a
bag of cornmeal up to his roof. He opens the small metal pigeon coop he built and steps inside. The sound of flapping fills the air.

All around him, the view is of destruction — broken walls, grey USAID tarps, the half-demolished National Palace in the distance.

The earthquake taught him many things — to live fiercely since death travels swiftly, to love well. It revealed humanity’s beauty and wretchedness. He doesn’t linger on it anymore. He cares only for life, he says.

A neighbour gave him his first pair of pigeons when he was 7. His coop has grown to 50 pairs since then. He makes no money off this. It’s just a hobby.

Even in the broken slums of the western hemisphere’s poorest country, there is joy.

Lalanne scatters some corn meal on the concrete roof followed by some corn kernels, and tenderly picks up his son, 1-year-old Davinsly. Together, they watch the pigeons descend, peck at their meal and explode back into the air.

His son is just a year younger than Lovely was the afternoon of the earthquake.

I ask him about that other mystery: How does he think such a small child survived six days without food or water?

“Oh,” he says, feline eyes widening and then fixing on mine. “That was God.”

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